Economic issues—including growing public debt, high inflation, slowing GDP growth, and a weak currency in recent years, all due in large part to low commodity prices—are thought to have contributed to mounting public frustration, turning the tide in favor of the opposition. A World Bank report highlighted earlier this year that creating more high-productivity and better quality jobs is a major concern in Ghana, particularly among the country’s youth. Both President Mahama and President-elect Akufo-Addo campaigned heavily on job creation, and Akufo-Addo specifically promised to construct 216 factories throughout the country—one in every district—to promote sustainable industrialization and new sources of employment.

AfDB holds 11th annual African Economic Conference as Senegal hosts the 2nd International Forum on Peace and Security in Africa

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https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/rtsv2rd-e1481321080891.jpg?w=270https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2016/12/09/technology-and-the-third-offset-foster-innovation-for-the-force-of-the-future/Technology and the “Third Offset” foster innovation for the force of the futurehttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/241263462/0/brookingsrss/topfeeds/latestfrombrookings~Technology-and-the-%e2%80%9cThird-Offset%e2%80%9d-foster-innovation-for-the-force-of-the-future/
Fri, 09 Dec 2016 20:31:18 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?p=346330

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The “Third Offset” strategy, officially launched with this year’s budget request, attempts to identify asymmetries between U.S. forces and those of potential adversaries. What role can military innovation play in enhancing U.S. military advantages?

First, Second, Third Offsets

Secretary Work reminded the audience that the United States has enjoyed a conventional advantage over recent adversaries. Importantly, that advantage has been against small regional powers. There has been less worry about peer competitors since the end of the Cold War, he said, but that has changed again over the past decade.

With an ascendant China and a re-strengthened Russia, a new military strategy called the Third Offset “helps deter a conventional conflict with a large state power,” according to Work. A key facet is strengthening conventional deterrence. In short, the Third Offset is meant to help prevent war with a great power by ensuring that if we did ever fight, we would prevail.

The First Offset, as O’Hanlon outlined, covers the full range of U.S. nuclear capabilities in the 1950s. The Second Offset is more focused on precision weaponry and air-land battle concepts from the 1970s and 1980s. All offsets, Work noted, “are focused on operational and organizational constructs that provide an advantage at the operational level of war.” But the Third Offset is more open-ended, long-term, and diffuse, compared to the first and second offsets. While we knew the end game of the First Offset and the Second Offset as they were developed, we do not necessarily know the end state when it comes to the Third Offset.

We do know that technology—specifically its connectedness to military organizations and to military doctrine—provide the key to the Third Offset. Secretary Work highlighted five areas of focus:

Learning machines

Human-machine collaboration

Assisted human operations (such as exoskeletons and wearables)

Man-unmanned combat teaming

Better autonomous weapons

Work stressed the criticalness of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and autonomy. “Putting AI and autonomy into the battle network is the most important thing we can do first,” he said. Missile defense, robotics, and unmanned systems also fit into the Third Offset framework, and Work said these systems can be thought of as “assisted human ops” (as distinct from “enhanced human ops,” which involve genetically modifying the soldier; that’s not something the United States is pursuing, but it is possible competitors may try). There is also a clear cyber element to the Third Offset—for one, autonomous machines driven by AI might be the first line of defense in a cyberattack.

What about possible ethical concerns of these military systems? O’Hanlon queried Secretary Work on the potential for machines making their own decision to shoot. Work indicated that was more likely to happen under authoritarian governments—pointing, for example, to a Soviet conception that was totally automatic. In the United States, he said, our focus has been on enabling better communications and network capabilities for the human warfighters.

The Third Offset, in Work’s view, is not unlike other major revolutions that started in the commercial technology space, such as the telegraph and railroad, which ultimately transformed war.

By land and by sea

Kelly Marchese reminded the audience that the Third Offset is not just about technology, highlighting the importance of overall architecture and integration. According to Marchese, the most important aspects are “operational and organizational constructs.” Since technology changes so rapidly, improving agility and the way technologies interact in a network are also key. Marchese expressed concern that networking standards have not been set.

O’Hanlon pointed out that many networks are unlikely to survive a cyber attack. Could much of our technology be rendered useless in such incidents?, he wondered. Marchese responded: “The good news is much of this technology is still not connected. The bad news is it needs to be connected to operate as effectively as we want.”

Related Books

Turning to more traditional means of warfighting, O’Hanlon asked Alan Easterling about the oceans, adding that they are thought of as an “area of great promise” in the international arena. Easterling agreed, but emphasized that there’s a problem with ships. Modern ships are very vulnerable, he said—during the Falklands War of 1982, for example, superior British ships proved little match for advanced missiles. That is very much the story today, Easterling added, saying: “Any surface vessel within 1,200 miles of determined opponent is at risk.” And this problem tends to push everyone underwater. In many ways, he said, submarines are the “last bastion of stealth.” There are still unresolved difficulties under water, though (including communication), and concluded that combining above and below water assets remains key.

Finally, O’Hanlon turned to land bases and their vulnerability. He pointed out that there are things we can do like hardening, dispersal, and retaining short-takeoff aircraft to help overcome the issues. But is this enough? Easterling argued that the best strategy is distribution, and that forward bases are often quickly overwhelmed, adding: the “age of the medium range ballistic missile changes everything.” Circling back to remarks by Secretary Work, Easterling remarked that the United States has not faced a foe with this kind of capability, and that it is of great potential concern.

While some challenges lie ahead, the overall message of the event was that the Third Offset strategy or its natural successor, whatever that may be called (but which will likely preserve many elements of the Third Offset), will offer considerable hope for the United States in the decades ahead.

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https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/cyberwar_center001.jpg?w=293https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2016/12/09/memos-to-the-president-on-the-future-of-u-s-education-policy/Memos to the president on the future of U.S. education policyhttp://webfeeds.brookings.edu/~/241218578/0/brookingsrss/topfeeds/latestfrombrookings~Memos-to-the-president-on-the-future-of-US-education-policy/
Fri, 09 Dec 2016 17:30:58 +0000https://www.brookings.edu/?p=345557

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For the next two-and-a-half weeks, the Chalkboard will feature special content as part of our series, “Memos to the president on the future of U.S. education policy.” We started this work several months ago, along with four project co-chairs, with the hope of informing broad questions about the appropriate federal role in education policymaking and specific questions of what federal policymakers should do.

We were motivated to undertake this task by last year’s enactment of the Every Student Succeeds Act and the upcoming inauguration of a new president. In this context of a changing federal role in education, we felt that detailed directives promoting effective federal policies would make valuable contributions to vigorous public debate.

Today, we are releasing the first product of that series. The project co-chairs—Douglas Harris, Helen Ladd, Marshall Smith, and Martin West—identified a set of principles to guide the federal government’s role in education policymaking. They present these principles, along with their historical grounding and context, in the new Brown Center report, A Principled Federal Role in PreK-12 Education.

This report on the federal role in education provides a foundation for the next part of the series: 12 policy memos from leading experts with recommendations for federal policymakers. We will release one memo on each business day from Thursday, December 8, through Friday, December 23. Each memo will take an issue facing PK-12 education, describe the current state of the issue (and the state of federal policy on that issue), and present specific policy recommendations to the incoming presidential administration grounded in current research.

We asked the memo writers not to cater their recommendations to a particular candidate, or president, but rather to present what they believe would be sound federal policy in their respective areas based on their knowledge of research on the topic, along with their insights and experiences. We hope these memos will be immediately useful to the Trump administration and the incoming secretary of education. We hope they will also be useful to others who work in education policy, whether at the federal level or not, as well as to subsequent administrations.

Of course, there are far more than 12 important issues in PreK-12 education today, and any series like this is bound to feel incomplete. In choosing which topics to cover, we prioritized issues with an important federal role and the potential for new federal policy during the coming administration. Our focus on the federal role turned us away from some topics—like the Common Core State Standards and charter schools—that rightly receive a great deal of attention but are fundamentally state or local issues. This series does not explicitly focus on topics in higher education, as we will leave that for a subsequent series, although a few memos in this series address issues beyond grade 12.

Our release schedule is as follows (and this page will be updated with links):

On the afternoon of Wednesday, January 4, we will host a public release event at Brookings (in Washington, DC) to discuss the federal role in PK-12 education. We will provide additional details through the Brown Center newsletter as they become available.

Having spent many days over the past few months talking with—and reading the work of—an extraordinary group of co-chairs and memo authors, we thought we would close with a couple of reflections.

First, we have been struck by the interconnectedness of these issues. For example, the country’s success in serving students’ comprehensive needs has clear implications for civil rights and students with special needs. Its success in producing high-quality, timely research has immediate implications for policies related to teachers, school finance, and early childhood. Each memo is valuable as a standalone product—and aims to be useful to a reader who reads only that memo—but reading across the Principles report and memos reveals an additional layer of richness and additional set of opportunities.

Second, we have been heartened to see experts of different political backgrounds find substantive areas of agreement. The co-chair team, in particular, tackled an unambiguously political question—about the appropriate federal role in education—as a group that has advised and served both Democratic and Republican administrations. While months of phone conversations and back-and-forth with document drafts unearthed some policy disagreements, the co-chairs were able to localize those disagreements and find agreement on their core questions. Moreover, in the policy memos, we saw many ideas that were either fundamentally apolitical or had elements that align with both Democratic and Republican principles. This includes, for example, Bob Schwartz’s insightful comments about ESEA’s focus on elementary rather than secondary education (making “ESEA” a misnomer), as well as proposals for child care tax credits as a strategy to improve access to high-quality care. Even in a time of hyper-partisanship, we see opportunities for education policymakers of different political parties to find more than enough agreement to tackle many of the challenges covered in this series.

We hope you will enjoy the series as it unfolds on the Chalkboard and that you will join us in January for the release event.

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Administrators of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have long been on the receiving end of litigation. Indeed, former Administrator Lee Thomas used to joke that he had a hard time getting a house mortgage after stepping down from his Reagan-era duties because his name appeared on so many suits against EPA.

Perhaps EPA incumbent Gina McCarthy will have a similar issue when her service ends with the upcoming presidential transition. If so, a good deal of the litigation filed against the agency during her tenure will bear the imprint of her likely successor, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who has been nominated by President-elect Donald Trump.

EPA has a long history of administrators with extensive state government experience, ranging from founding head William Ruckelshaus to McCarthy. But Pruitt represents the first state attorney general to vault into the lead role at EPA, though he has also been a career politician with extensive experience in the state legislature in Oklahoma City.

State attorneys general tend to be highly ambitious politically and often use their post to seek higher office. Think former Arkansas AG Bill Clinton or Alabama AG Jeff Sessions. Pruitt, their Oklahoma neighbor, now follows this path.

Many state AGs seek political visibility through aggressive policy engagement within their state, often using investigative or litigative powers to examine wrongdoing at home. But Pruitt has largely eschewed this in favor of a strategy to express outrage against regulatory decisions taken by EPA and related federal agencies.

He has specialized in getting to the microphone quickly and launching litigative assault, whether the issue involved climate, water, or oil and gas development. His common refrain has been that EPA has overreached its statutory authority and encroached on state policy terrain.

It is not clear that this approach has had much success in the courts but it has built him a broad following in the energy production industry and in conservative circles. Oklahoma has recently been selected by the Fraser Institute as the most attractive government in the world to pursue oil and natural gas investment.

This reputation has been built on a series of actions from respective legislators and governors and industry-friendly state agencies but also kindly treatment from the attorney general. Oklahoma has been at the literal epicenter of the growing global debate about earthquakes linked to injection of oil and gas wastes back into the ground after extraction via fracking.

The state averaged one to three quakes per year from 1974 through 2008 but has since experienced exponential growth in the number of these episodes, reaching a record 903 last year.

Most of these have been relatively modest, though there has also been an uptick in the number exceeding magnitude 3, including a 5.8 event near Pawnee in September that damaged buildings near the state’s major oil pipeline hub.

Pruitt and other state leaders have been remarkably slow to acknowledge this pattern or its link with expanded oil and gas activity. They have struggled mightily to develop any serious plan to address this issue, quietly siding with those who either deny the problem (T. Boone Pickens: “Earthquakes my ass.”) or expect it to fade over time.

The state has experienced considerable increase in use of renewables, particularly its exceptional wind potential. Most of its neighboring states, including Texas, have more robust policies that encourage the development of renewables and expand transmission capacity, however.

But Pruitt will likely soon leave this cozy base of operation, receiving praise from oil and gas producers while heaping invective on the EPA and the staff that he may soon lead. It is highly unclear, however, just what he will do in his role, especially following decades of political inability to revise popular and durable environmental statutes addressing air and water quality. He will have to confront issues that range from vehicle emission standards to preventing oil spills and future Flints. There may be real limits to simply saying that state and local governments should do whatever they deem best.

One guide may be the most controversial EPA head, Anne Gorsuch, who served during the very early years of the Reagan Administration. Gorsuch had previously been a stalwart critic of the agency, from her seat in the Colorado legislature. She essentially tried to dismantle the agency, undertaking a major set of transitions by concentrating power very close to her office and engaging in quiet conversations with regulated industry over regulatory backpedaling.

Of course, this only lasted a relatively short time. Gorsuch badly overplayed her hand and stumbled on issues like phasing out lead from gasoline and cleaning up toxic sites. Under siege by Congress, the Reagan Administration ultimately threw her under the bus long before she could become a re-election liability. Gorsuch was replaced with an emergency pinch-hit by the more experienced and less combustive Ruckelshaus and then Thomas, who was more focused on agency management than making headlines.

It is not at all clear whether Pruitt will follow the Gorsuch path or break new ground. But he will soon lose his most familiar option, heading to the microphones to denounce and then sue the Environmental Protection Agency.

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Ambassador Norman Eisen, visiting fellow in Governance Studies and former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic, discusses the controversies surrounding President-elect Trump’s transition to the White House and his new report on open government.

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President-elect Donald J. Trump has vowed “to terminate the deal” that his predecessor in the White House negotiated with Cuba’s President Raúl Castro. Trump’s incoming chief-of-staff, Reince Priebus, last week added these details in an interview on “Fox News Sunday”:

“Repression, open markets, freedom of religion, political prisoners – these things need to change in order to have open and free relationships,” Priebus said. “There’s going to have to be some movement from Cuba in order to have a relationship with the United States.”

In fact, beyond the exchange of prisoners and humanitarian gestures carried out two years ago, there was no conventional deal behind most of President Barack Obama’s Cuba initiatives. Rather, Obama mostly acted unilaterally in the belief that rebuilding relations between the U.S. and Cuba would eventually move a post-Castro Cuba toward a more open economy and freer society. Obama was playing the long game, confident that removing the U.S. as “the enemy” would help the Cuban people opt for more pluralist alternatives to an archaic centralized socialism.

For Obama, then, attempting to negotiate each step with the Cuban government in a tit-for-tat exchange would only have delayed matters, and conceded to Havana control over the pace of change.

Donald Trump, by contrast, fashions himself a dealmaker, and as such wants to extract some “concessions” from across the table. But in the hypersensitive arena of U.S.-Cuba relations, such an approach has historically been counterproductive.

To ask that the Cuban government abandon power is of course a non-starter, just as Trump the businessman would never forfeit all his corporate assets for the sake of negotiation. But if the president-elect is prepared to temper some of his rhetoric, the outlines of a grand bargain that would be in the mutual interests of both countries, and allow both Trump and Raúl Castro to save face and declare victory, could begin to take shape. That could include cooperation on issues like terrorism and narcotics, private property claims, open markets (domestic and international), and, in the political sphere, religious freedoms, internet access and political prisoners.

All signs point to the Trump administration making the battle against international terrorism the centerpiece of its foreign policy. In this prolonged struggle, the U.S. and Cuba are very much on the same side: Marxists typically view terrorism as foolishly provocative and politically counterproductive. The U.S. and Cuba do not always agree on which organizations deserve the terrorist label, but an agreement in principle—and with specific measures to combat terrorist financing and arms trafficking—is certainly feasible. Indeed, the U.S. and Cuba have already signed agreements on international law enforcement and counternarcotics that could be wrapped into a comprehensive security cooperation accord. They could also accelerate progress on handling fugitives and migrant smuggling.

Another low-hanging fruit would be settlement of claims of U.S. property holders nationalized in the early days of the Cuban revolution. U.S. authorities have certified some 6,000 claims valued at $2 billion in 1960 dollars. The Cubans accept the principle of compensation for nationalized properties, and two rounds of bilateral talks have been held. The outline of an agreement is apparent: Cuba could agree to compensate the smaller claims – worth around $230 million – while allowing the larger corporate claimants to re-enter the Cuban market under mutually acceptable terms. However, Cuba would have to drop its claims for damages from the U.S. commercial embargo, a deal-breaker that would create unacceptable precedents for any government that regularly employs economic sanctions as an instrument of diplomacy.

Well aware of the failings of its outdated socialist economy, Cuba has been relaxing restrictions on domestic business and international investment for some time. The Trump administration could add its weight to those many Cubans who are demanding more rapid progress toward a market economy. The Cuban authorities could credibly claim that they were already contemplating such next steps in their transition toward a more decentralized, open and prosperous economy.

The Trump administration could add meat to these economic understandings by continuing the Obama policy of allowing U.S. firms to engage with Cuban entrepreneurs. Trump could go even further, and permit Cuban-Americans to invest in businesses that benefit their families and the Cuban people.

Then there are the social issues. In demanding religious freedom, Priebus overlooks the fact that Cuba has hosted three Roman Catholic Popes and the Orthodox Church Patriarch, and permits U.S. evangelicals to assist local congregants who are visibly active throughout the island. Both Fidel and Raúl Castro have visited Jewish synagogues to demonstrate their acceptance of religious pluralism; long ago, Cuba redefined itself from an atheistic to a secular society.

Raúl Castro has said he will step down from office in just 15 months, but it’s unrealistic to think that the next generation of Cuban socialist leaders will agree to abandon power. Releasing some political prisoners, however, is certainly within the ballpark, even as they will label it a humanitarian gesture. As with other elements of this proposed deal, the Cubans will not admit their actions were taken to please the United States – the public packaging will have to be sensitive to each nation’s domestic politics.

Such a comprehensive deal encompassing key U.S. foreign policy objectives—security and counterterrorism, resolving long-standing claims and guaranteeing property rights, promoting more open and competitive markets, ensuring religious and some political freedoms—would serve the interests of both Americans and Cubans. The deal is there for the taking.

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The Trump campaign of 2016 will doubtlessly go down as one of the most dramatic and sensational in history, especially considering Trump’s tendency to spark national controversy on Twitter. Although the president-elect’s style of social media usage is of a kind highly unusual in the political sphere, the rising importance of digital media in presidential campaigns cannot be solely attributed to one candidate.

The use of social media as a major campaign strategy was first pioneered by President Barack Obama in the 2008 election and was repeated successfully in 2012. His strategy encompassed a range of elements, including Facebook, online fundraising, and a YouTube channel, paired with more traditional forms of outreach via phone and direct mail. The millennial generation (those born between 1981 and 1998) has been a driving force behind the rise of social media and is attributed with tipping the scales in President Obama’s favor both election cycles.

Given that social media has become an integral component of the political process during a time of dramatic polarization, there is a concern that the digital world has become a means to filter out opposing opinions from one’s personal online universe – creating an “echo chamber.” Data from the Pew Research Center reveal that the echo chamber is not necessarily born of a refusal to consider opposing viewpoints, but has developed out of the negative political climate and of the desire to avoid confrontation.

Diversity of opinion on social media

Social media is widely marketed as an interconnected environment that enables content sharing, collaboration, and shared dialogue. This would seemingly appeal to anyone with an inclination for political debate, which requires careful consideration of a variety of viewpoints, evidence, and opinions. However, social media does not currently live up its this potential to contribute to healthy democratic debate.

Upon examination of Americans’ social media habits, the data reveal that about a third of users do not perceive much diversity of opinion in their news feeds, though many seem to recognize the value of exposure to diverse views. The Pew Research Center’s State of the Media 2016 study shows that 31 percent of social media users perceive the news posted by their friends or family to present diverse opinions, while 35 percent say posts from friends or family present just one set of viewpoints. Of this subset, 69 percent say they would like to see more diverse viewpoints in their online social circle, while 30 percent are okay with one-sidedness.

The fact that users indicate they would like to see more diversity of opinion, however, does not guarantee that they enjoy the intensity of online debates. Of social media users who have encountered online political discussions this election cycle, the majority believe that these conversations are less respectful (53 percent) and less likely to come to a resolution (51 percent) than they would be if held offline. Of those who network with users with opposing political views, 59 percent say that their “social media interactions… are stressful and frustrating,” and 64 percent say these encounters “leave them feeling as if they have less in common than they thought.”

Political engagement on social media

The social networking site most commonly used in 2016 is Facebook, which also has more potential to facilitate substantive debate than most other forms of social media. Facebook users are able to post news content, as on other platforms, but they can also include longer captions and have deeper political conversations through comment sections than is possible on other sites. Yet simply because this kind of in-depth discussion is possible does not mean users engage in it.

In the current climate of negativity, many social media users choose to avoid confrontation with those with whom they disagree, which begins with ignoring material they find offensive. Pew reports that 83 percent of users simply ignore content they find controversial. When that fails, 31 percent of users tailor their feeds to see less of that content, and 27 percent may block or unfriend the source.

Surprisingly, Pew’s data reveal that the majority of young users are no more likely than older age groups to engage in collaborative political behavior online. Those aged between 30 and 64 are among the most likely to share or repost news stories on social media, while those between 50 and 64 years old are the most likely to comment on news stories on social media.

Given this set of data, the echo chamber appears to function differently for each age group: Younger Americans generally show low voter turnout and are less likely to participate in political discussions online, while older generations turn out at much higher rates and use social media in a more substantive manner. Millennials are also less likely to trust national media and follow news all or most of the time.

An uncertain future

Although the Obama campaigns demonstrated that digital movements have become an integral part of voter outreach in the 21st century, it is difficult to assess exactly how social media may have tipped the scales in 2016. On the one hand, millennials dominate the social media landscape and tend to lean Democratic–a trend that held up in 2016, though the Republican share of young voters did increase slightly. On the other hand, Trump had 2.8 million more Twitter followers and roughly 4 million more likes on Facebook than Hillary Clinton just before the election. In the end, President-elect Trump’s message of change was what stuck with voters.

Facebook is a donor to the Brookings Institution. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions posted in this piece are solely those of the authors and not influenced by any donation.

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Donald Trump’s election places in immediate peril the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) reached by Iran and the P5+1 (China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States). We don’t know what Trump will do with the JCPOA, nor do we know for certain how he will approach Iran more broadly. During his campaign, Trump’s comments on the issue were all over the map.

Not for nothing, the old debates around the JCPOA and Iran in general have reheated. Some have urged Trump to leave the JCPOA in place, to be enforced fully and serve as a foundation for future engagement with Iran to address regional issues. Others have suggested “rolling back” the JCPOA as fast as possible—one of them is Mike Pompeo, Trump’s nominee for director of the CIA. Still others have suggested renegotiating the JCPOA, which could mean leaving the deal in place for a time while building additional leverage against Iran, including through non-nuclear sanctions.

Assumptions and arguments underlying renegotiation

But can the deal be renegotiated, especially after the United States expands dramatically the pressure that it can apply on Iran with non-nuclear sanctions and other tools? The concept sounds reasonable, and would align with Saudi and Israeli preferences. Plus, it fits with Trump’s purported plan to cut deals around the world.

As I have written elsewhere, I think an attempt to renegotiate will likely fail, thus dealing a significant blow to the JCPOA itself. I also think that those advancing this argument dramatically overestimate the ability of the United States to renegotiate the deal and underestimate the difficulty of avoiding killing it in the process. There are three core assumptions that undergird the renegotiation argument itself:

The JCPOA is failing, with Iranian compliance already in doubt (so there is little to risk);

Sanctions leverage can deliver a better deal and better Iranian behavior outside of the nuclear track (and, in fact, would have if the Obama administration had not retreated from the pressure track in 2013); and

International partners will have no choice but to go along with the United States.

Through these assumptions, Trump’s administration may conclude that the risk of this approach is slight and/or worth taking. After all, walking away from a failing, fatally flawed deal sounds better and is more reassuring than a decision to bet the farm on a roll of the dice. The trouble, though, is that each of those three assumptions has major problems.

The JCPOA is not failing

Iran is fulfilling its commitments under the JCPOA and so are the United States and its partners. All parties to the JCPOA are getting what they paid for, even if they are not yet in receipt of the bonuses that they may have anticipated and desired.

Iran’s compliance with its nuclear provisions is a central question motivating calls for reconsidering the deal—but the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has verified, three times now, that Iran has fulfilled the terms of the JCPOA. Add that to the monthly reports of Iranian compliance with the JCPOA’s predecessor arrangement, the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA), and we now have a record of nearly three years of Iranian compliance with its voluntarily assumed international nonproliferation obligations.

This alone is a cause worth celebrating: for the first time since 2005, Iran has suspended nuclear activities pursuant to an international agreement; for the first time since 2005, additional transparency and monitoring is in place in Iran’s nuclear facilities; for the first time since 2005, we do not face the prospect of a reactor at Arak capable of producing 1 to 2 weapons’ worth of weapons-usable plutonium per year; and for the first time since 2007, the number of installed centrifuges at Natanz has stabilized and amount of enriched uranium being produced halted. The IAEA’s confirmation of these facts has been clear and consistent.

It is true that there have been some implementation problems: Iran has twice now held stocks of heavy water that slightly exceeded the 130 metric tonnes threshold established in the JCPOA, but agreed subsequently to ship out amounts exceeding what was necessary to stay under the threshold. And in both cases, the verification and detection systems of the JCPOA—and the IAEA—worked perfectly. And it is true that some questions about the JCPOA still exist: For example, what is the current definition of recoverable low enriched uranium in the country, and what kinds of research and development may Iran engage in? The JCPOA is itself ambiguous and, though press reports suggest that the Joint Commission has made decisions about these matters, JCPOA participants have not presented this information publicly.

Some have pointed out that it’s impossible to independently confirm IAEA reports of Iranian compliance, since the IAEA reports are not fully public. There has even been the implication that the IAEA has been politicized and that its judgments are no longer its own, but rather those of the P5+1. These comments are perilous, both in their weak foundation and in the consequences of the unnecessary delegitimization of the IAEA. First, the IAEA has an obligation to keep confidential some aspects of what it knows about the Iranian nuclear program. Second, a relative paucity of news on Iran’s program is not necessarily bad news, particularly when clear statements about Iranian compliance are being offered. It is worth noting that a similar mindset persisted with Iraq in 2002-2003, to our common lament. The incoming Trump administration should take seriously what the IAEA and, indeed, what the intelligence community provides, rather than start with the assumption that the absence of smoke means a fire is being carefully hidden or baselessly undermine the conclusions both reach, as Trump did during his campaign. And what intelligence has shown, whether it fits Trump’s perceptions or not, is that the JCPOA did achieve its purposes and, as of this writing, Iran is meeting its terms. To undermine or damage the JCPOA because of what Iran may do in the future is simply not sensible. Moreover, it helps to create a sense that Iran can never be trusted, no matter what the IAEA or intelligence community reports, which ultimately would be inimical to any renegotiated deal Trump might produce.

U.S. sanctions leverage cannot automatically deliver a better deal—it is finite and the leverage it affords is limited

Though the United States has considerable economic power, its power—and its leverage— remains limited. There are practical limitations to what the United States can achieve in wielding its economic might, and there are costs to the wielding.

Some have argued that the United States gave up leverage in seeking the JPOA when it did. They point to Iran’s cratering economy in 2011-2013; its insolvent financial sector; and high unemployment and inflation rates. They also contend that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s mandate for economic reform, stemming from his election, would have made him bend eventually.

But I, and others, think that sanctions leverage had reached its zenith, or near enough: Iran made an economic rebound in 2013, with inflation, unemployment, and GDP growth having stabilized before JPOA sanctions relief; oil prices were high; there were no reasonable new targets for sanctions imposition, with most of Iran’s banks, its primary export industries, and service industries under sanctions; and there were few indications that real economic dislocation was going to lead to regime-damaging pressure.

It is inconceivable that, in the face of the Rouhani government’s willingness to seek a deal via the P5+1, the United States would have been able to stay away. Had the United States held out for an ideal outcome (demanding that there be no uranium enrichment in Iran for a considerable length of time, for instance), then international opinion might soon have turned against Washington, identifying it, not Iran, as the intransigent party and damaging a possible sanctions effort. This isn’t to say that the United States had to accept a deal the moment negotiations began, but once a reasonable deal was on the table, the costs of walking away naturally went up.

This same principle is in play for JCPOA skeptics. They can choose to walk away, but they will have to pay the cost of what would probably be incomplete implementation of sanctions internationally. This would sap the overall effectiveness of the strategy and JCPOA opponents have already begun spinning a story to address this problem, arguing that the JCPOA reduced the potency of any future sanctions effort by giving Iran sorely needed relief. Iran has not become invulnerable in the past three years. At best, Iran received two years’ worth of oil revenues previously held up and one year’s worth of oil sales at reduced prices, as well as some limited other trade. JCPOA opponents can try to paint this as immunizing Iran from future pressure (which, of course, also lessens their sense of the burden for failure of their preferred strategy), but the real problem they will face is in getting partners to support their efforts as the Obama administration did through real investment in engagement and negotiations.

Of course, with a lesser sanctions effort, the Trump administration would be hard-pressed to recreate even the JCPOA, let alone something stronger or covering non-nuclear issues.

If we walk, we likely walk alone

It is here that JCPOA opponents, now giddy about the possibility of reversing or renegotiating the JCPOA, have their work cut out. Most of the world is satisfied with the JCPOA and the results of its implementation and does not want to see the JCPOA endangered either to improve its terms now or address other issues. The Trump administration would have to convince countries first to join in a renegotiation effort or embrace a strategy that might imperil the JCPOA to get at non-nuclear issues; and, second, if that stalls or fails, to reimpose sanctions against Iran or accept U.S. sanctions to restrict the business activities of their banks and companies.

In the right context (such as Iranian cheating), the United States could regather the coalition of states necessary to reimpose costs on the Iranian government and perhaps compel compliance. In such a context though, I doubt international sanctions pressure would shift Iranian decisionmaking and bring it back into compliance, judging that an Iranian decision to walk away from the JCPOA would—in effect—be an Iranian decision to restart its nuclear weapons program, come what may.

Trump would have few allies in a decision to abandon the JCPOA. Some JCPOA skeptics apparently agree, hoping to get Iran to back away from the deal instead by amping up the pressure on Iran for non-nuclear issues. Unless there is Iranian cheating, they judge that there is insufficient global support for a renewed pressure campaign.

The United States won’t be able to snap its fingers and compel cooperation from countries, banks, and companies. Instead, it would be fighting an uphill struggle, all while Iran either divides the international community by playing the victim or by expanding its nuclear program, putting at risk the stability and security of the Middle East.

Conclusion

JCPOA opponents who will soon take power ought to think long and hard before they make precipitous decisions about the deal’s future. On balance, leaving the JCPOA alone and pursuing a regional agenda in ways compliant with the JCPOA’s provisions would be the best policy.

However, should they choose to forge their own path, observers should hold them accountable for the arguments they promulgate about why such a course had to be pursued in the first place. The case against the JCPOA is modest, to say the least, and suffers from flawed assumptions. But, they will be compelling if the JCPOA is seen as an inevitable failure, flawed at the outset and in its execution.

The JCPOA is working well. It is achieving its objectives and arguments against both its negotiation and implementation are hardly inviolate. It can be improved upon and, as I set out separately in a piece with Bob Einhorn, it should serve as a foundation for a stronger, more durable, more stable nuclear order in the Middle East. But, to get to that order, the JCPOA must first survive. It merits that chance and the honesty of its opponents.

Some scholars predict that by 2018 the United States will be short three million college graduates (Carnevale, Smith, and Strohl, 2010). The conversation among the higher education policy community has shifted from a focus on college enrollment to concerns about college completion. Perhaps partly in response to growing concerns about an insufficiently educated labor force and low rates of college completion, there has been a large growth in short, vocationally-oriented credential programs at public community colleges over the past decade and a half.

In fact, the number of short vocational credentials1 awarded by Title-IV eligible, public community colleges grew by 109 percent between 2000 and 2012 (author’s calculations using IPEDS). These programs require less than the two years of full-time study required for an associate degree and result in a certificate (in some states some of these credentials are referred to as diplomas). These credentials may be long-term certificates (which require at least one year of full-time study, but less than two years) or short-term certificates (which require less than one year of full-time study). These certificates are offered in many different fields including nursing, commercial vehicle operations, law enforcement, and business. Many of them are awarded in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields including health care-related fields and advanced manufacturing. However, very little is known about these programs. Though there is an emerging literature exploring the economic returns for students who earn these credentials, many questions remain.

Ex ante, it is unclear whether students would benefit from enrolling in these types of short, vocational credential programs. On the one hand, these credentials could be tightly coupled with local labor market needs and provide students with tangible skills that could help them get jobs. On the other hand, these short programs of study could leave students with a credential that means little to employers and offer them no clear avenue to additional schooling. The rapid growth in short- and long-term certificates awarded by public community colleges may be a positive development, but these credentials must be thoughtfully designed if they are to have any hope of improving students’ labor market outcomes or their access to further education.

This policy report is about STEM-focused workforce training programs at public community colleges which award these types of short, vocational credentials. The purpose of this brief is to report on research conducted to learn more about what common program components are shared across several successful workforce training programs at public community colleges across the United States. In the next section of the report I review the literature on vocational training programs at community colleges. This research is built around the question of whether there is an economic benefit for students participating in these programs. However, these estimates of the economic returns to vocational credentials point to several important questions about the design of programs. In the third section of this report, I use the data from informational interviews I conducted with community college and program leaders and developers to identify five characteristics of promising STEM-focused workforce development programs. In section four I use what I learned from these interviews to make five policy recommendations related to the development of future workforce training programs. The final section of this report concludes.

Background on workforce development credentials

Positive returns to vocational certificates

Several early studies using national data showed that there are economic benefits for students earning associate degrees as well as shorter credentials from community college (Leigh and Gill, 1997; Marcotte et al., 2005; see Belfield and Bailey 2011 for a review). Leigh and Gill (1997) make use of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to estimate the returns to education for returning adults,2 compared to students that continue directly from high school into a degree program. Using ordinary least squares regressions controlling for previous ability, the authors find that attending a non-degree program (i.e. a certificate program) at a community college increases earnings 8 to 10 percent more for returning adults than it does for continuing students. Studies using national data sets were the first to suggest that there may be a benefit for students earning short, vocational credentials. However, because these programs are designed to improve students’ ability to access local labor markets, it is important to study these credentials in local contexts, using state-level data.

In one of the first studies making use of a state administrative data set to examine the economic benefits of completing short, vocational credentials, Jepsen, Troske, and Coomes (2014) makes use of data from Kentucky’s public community college system for cohorts entering in 2002 and 2003. These authors estimate the economic returns to certificates, which are one or two semesters, diplomas, which are between one and two years of study and associate degrees which require 60-76 credits. Using quarterly wage data for students as much as six years after entry, they find that women completing associate degrees experience a return of $2,363, per quarter, on average while men have returns of $1,484, per quarter, on average. In percentage terms, this is a return of 56 percent, on average, for women and 24 percent, on average, for men. Diplomas are associated with a return of $1,914, on average, for women and $1,265, on average, for men (which is 45 percent for women and 21 percent for men). Finally, Jepsen et al. (2014) find that men and women earning certificates at public community colleges in Kentucky experience a return of approximately $300, on average, which, in percentage terms, is seven percent for women and five percent for men.

Since this study by Jepsen et al., a growing body of studies have used state longitudinal data to estimate the returns to short credentials in local contexts. Backes et al (2014) make use of data from the Florida public higher education system and find relatively high returns to mostly technical certificate programs, and to associate of science degrees rather than associate of arts degrees. Dadger and Trimble (2015) make use of data from public community and technical colleges in the State of Washington and find that for students earning an associate degree or longer certificate, there are positive effects on wages, hours worked, and probability of employment. However, these authors also find that there are minimal to no effects from earning a short-term (program of study lasting less than a year) certificates. Moreover, Dadger and Trimble (2015) find that women experience more positive effects of earning these types of credentials. This suggests that there may be heterogeneity in returns across fields of study because most common fields of study vary by gender.

Finally, Xu and Trimble (2016) make use of state administrative data from Virginia and North Carolina to estimate the economic returns to short and long certificates from public community colleges within these state higher education systems. They find variation across these two states in the return to certificates as well as in the effect of earning a certificate on probability of employment. On average, they find that both short- and long-term certificates have positive impacts on earnings and probability of employment in both states. In the case of both of these outcomes, the effect of earning a certificate is of greater magnitude in North Carolina. The authors also examine the effect on quarterly earnings conditional on employment and find effects for only short-term certificates in Virginia and only long-term certificates in North Carolina.

Varying returns across programs and fields of study

The studies described above establish that, on average, there are labor market benefits for students who earn short, vocational credentials at public community colleges. However, these average estimates mask heterogeneity in returns across field of study.

Chabot College dental hygiene student Rimpi Walia performs a procedure on a patient during a free medical clinic REUTERS/Stephen Lam

Backes et al. (2014) find that for students in Florida, the largest returns are for students acquiring technical skills. They find that students earning short credentials in health, transportation, construction, manufacturing (mostly certificates), and security experience economic returns when they enter the labor market. Stevens et al. (2015) find that in California, there are statistically significant returns to most credentials earned in health, business, engineering and industrial technology, family and consumer science, and protective services. On the other hand, students earning credentials in IT-related fields do not experience positive returns to their degrees (Stevens et al., 2015). In Washington State, Dadger and Trimble (2015) find that there is a large return to nursing degrees for women. In addition, they find that there is a large return to short-term degrees in protective services for men. Though, for women, on average, the returns to long-term certificates are higher than the returns to associate degrees, there are positive returns to associate degree across fields, whereas the positive returns to the long-term certificates are driven by the large number of degrees of that type awarded in nursing or allied health (Dadger and Trimble, 2015). Xu and Trimble (2016), making use of data from Virginia and North Carolina, also disaggregate effects by program of study and program within broad field of study. They find considerable heterogeneity within field, across states, as well as within state, across field of study. Their most consistent finding is that there are positive returns to certificates in health-related fields (Xu and Trimble, 2016).

Xu and Trimble (2016) also make the point that, within health-related certificates, there is heterogeneity in returns across specific programs of study. For example, there are large, positive returns to long-term certificates in “dental assisting” but returns to programs in medical office assisting are not statistically significant (Xu and Trimble, 2016). Finally, they compare the industries in which students were employed before and after completing their certificates in order to explore the hypothesis that some of the economic returns to these programs are due to students using these certificates to move from a low to a high paying industry. A large percent of their sample does appear to be using the certificate programs in this way.

On average, across programs, within states, completing a vocational credential at a community college is beneficial for students, particularly in some fields.

These studies demonstrate that on average, across programs, within states, completing a vocational credential at a community college is beneficial for students, particularly in some fields. However, the heterogeneity in returns across fields of study and across programs within particular fields suggest that there are additional factors, possibly related to program design or links with local labor markets that affect whether or not students benefit from earning these types of credentials from public community colleges.

Two studies provide some evidence as to how program design may affect the returns to these credentials. Grubb (1995) demonstrates that students experience a return to their degrees only when they find work in fields related to their field of study. In addition, Xu and Trimble (2016) disaggregate estimates, not just by field of study, but also by programs within a given field and find heterogeneity in returns across programs. This suggests that workforce training programs are very different in their ability to produce strong returns for graduates. Why this variation exists is unclear, but programs designed around clear local labor needs and with links to local employers are plausible drivers of this observed variation. Xu and Trimble’s (2016) finding that there is heterogeneity across program of study in the benefits students experience to earning these credentials could also be used to infer that employers place a value on community college training for some jobs but not others.

Despite this growing body of research on the effect of earning a short, vocational credential from a public community college, many questions about these training programs remain. For example, how do specific program features mediate these benefits? To what extent does it matter whether a training program has links with local industries? Also, to what extent does it matter whether students earn a nationally recognized license in the process of earning a vocational credential from a community college? Finally, how do pedagogical and curricular features of the program affect who enrolls in, completes, and benefits from these programs?

To my knowledge, only one extant study helps us understand the extent to which program design features affect whether students benefit from workforce training. Maguire et al. (2010) study the effects on students’ labor market success of participating in one of three sectoral employment programs around the U.S. Because this study focuses on just three programs, rather than averaging across many different programs at many different community colleges, the authors are able to identify common program elements that may contribute to student success (Maguire et al., 2010). Maguire et al. (2010) evaluate short-term outcomes for students participating in short vocational training programs at one of three nonprofits: the Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership, Jewish Vocational Service- Boston, or Per Scholas. Importantly, these programs are all well-established and recruit students to participate who they have determined have a high probability of success. In addition, because these programs are run out of nonprofits, they may be more flexible and able to adapt to local labor market needs than programs at public community colleges. Finally, it may be easier for these nonprofit programs to maintain successful relationships with local industry if they have less bureaucracy or other hurdles to overcome than most public community colleges. The authors find positive impacts, on average, on probability of employment and wages for students who participate in training programs offered by these nonprofits. The authors identify several characteristics of these programs that make them successful. For example, these programs have administrative flexibility, strong relationships with local employers, they teach general skills as applied to the occupation students are preparing to enter, and they provide students with any additional support they need to finish the program and find a job. In my research into what makes STEM-focused workforce training programs at public community colleges successful, I found many similarities between the promising programs I identified and the three programs evaluated by Maguire et al. (2010).

Components of a successful workforce development program

In order to learn more about successful STEM-focused workforce training programs at public community colleges around the U.S., I first contacted three experts in the field and asked them to recommend promising programs run by community colleges or by nonprofits with some community college connection. I then contacted each of the program or college leaders recommended by these experts and asked for a short, 30-minute phone interview. In the cases in which I successfully procured an interview, I asked those I spoke to if they could recommend an additional contact within their program for me to interview. Through this “snowball” method I was able to obtain multiple perspectives into the daily functioning of several workforce training programs.

I used a semi-structured interview approach in which I started by asking interviewees to simply describe their program,3 As they spoke I asked clarifying questions or additional questions about particularly interesting features of their program or its development, building on what interviewees brought up in the course of their general descriptions. I also asked all of those I interviewed to explain what they thought were the keys to the success of their program as well as any obstacles they faced in the program’s development or day-to-day maintenance. Through this approach I learned about the daily functioning of multiple different workforce training programs in public community colleges around the country. I also gained an understanding of what makes individual programs successful from the viewpoints of the program leaders, developers, professors, and tutors who I interviewed. What follows are five themes or commonalities I identified across programs that seem to contribute to their success.

Successful workforce training programs at public community colleges include industry or employer engagement in curricular development.

Workforce training programs at public community colleges are often criticized for providing training that is misaligned with local labor market needs (Holzer, 2015). Critics argue that students in these programs are trained on old equipment and graduate with outdated skills (Holzer, 2015). In order to assure that workforce development programs at community colleges prepare students to meet the labor demands of local industries, both in terms of broad area of focus and specific technical skills, successful programs engage local employers when curriculum are being developed.

Spaulding and Martin-Caughey (2015) develop a framework for improving industry engagement with workforce training programs. These authors start by identifying obstacles to cooperation between workforce training programs and local industries. On the college side obstacles may include competition for funding, a lack of understanding of how to effectively engage employers and inability to adapt or change quickly (Spaulding and Martin-Caughey, 2015). On the employer side obstacles include not seeing the value in working with community colleges if they can train their workers themselves. Also, employers might not want to work with each other if they compete for labor and market shares (Spaulding and Martin-Caughey, 2015). In addition, cooperation between industry and local community colleges may be time intensive and difficult if there is a culture clash or the two types of organizations don’t “speak the same language.” Employers may also have trouble working with local colleges if there is no clear process for developing the relationship. If colleges don’t have a point of contact for local businesses, then, though businesses may try to engage with local community colleges, the right person at the college may not get the message. Finally, administrators at the college may also be concerned about stepping on the toes of other departments and want to be careful not to “steal” a potential relationship that colleagues in another department are trying to develop.

Promising workforce training programs manage to engage with employers despite these obstacles. First, representatives from successful workforce development programs describe surveying local employers to determine their needs before developing program curricula, so that they do not produce workers with outdated skills or skills that are misaligned with local labor market needs. One representative from Growth Sector, a sectoral partnership in which a third party collaborator (Growth Sector) helps to facilitate networks between community colleges and local industries in California, described surveying local employers before determining the math curriculum for their workforce training program.

Representatives from Lorain County Community College (LCC) describe a multistage process which culminated in the development of their mechatronics program and the creation of their SMART Center.4 In the course of the development of this program LCC was able to overcome each of the obstacles identified above. First, because college leaders and program developers at LCC had access to an “innovation fund” they had the resources to survey local employers and identify that there was a need for workers trained in sensor technology. After identifying this local labor market need, they submitted a grant application to the state for the funds necessary to buy equipment and create the SMART Center. In this way they made sure that students would be trained on the most up-to-date equipment. Next, they leveraged a long-standing relationship with Case Western University to staff the SMART Center and borrowed and adapted curricula from a program in New Mexico to develop their training program.

Because LCC truly thinks of itself as the “community’s college,” college leaders have placed a premium on establishing and maintaining long-standing relationships with local industry. As a result of this mindset and these established networks, LCC does not have trouble communicating with local employers. Additionally, local employers have a strong incentive to work with LCC because of the SMART Center. The SMART Center fills a local training need because it is not cost-effective for local employers to buy the equipment they would need to train workers in this sensor technology. In fact, local employers farm out work to LCC’s SMART Center, which in turn employs students from its MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems) training program. Thus, not only is this program at LCC filling an essential training need for local industries, the SMART Center is providing a forum for students to engage with employers, building networks that should help them when they graduate from the program at LCC.

Spaulding and Martin-Caughey (2015) point out that there are multiple ways in which an employer may benefit from engaging with workforce training programs. For example, employers benefit from these relationships if they provide the opportunity to find qualified workers, allow businesses to avoid or reduce costs associated with training their own workers, or fill training needs that would be inefficient for the employer to provide themselves (Spaulding and Martin-Caughey, 2015). Successful workforce training programs provide the opportunity for employers to realize all of these benefits.

Promising workforce training programs include the opportunity for students to gain workplace experience in the course of their program of study.

Another common trait of the STEM-focused workforce training programs in my sample is that they provide students the opportunity to gain some work experience through some type of internship. Student internships clearly benefit students by giving them the chance to gain experience in their chosen field, allowing them to apply skills they learn in the classroom and providing the opportunity for them to build their professional networks. Hosting internships also has benefits for employers as it gives them the chance to try out potential workers at a relatively low cost.

As described above, though LCC’s MEMS training program may not provide internship opportunities with outside employers, the SMART Center provides a parallel opportunity for students to engage with employers. Internships are also an essential component of P-tech, an early college high school, the first of which was developed in Brooklyn, that developed out of a collaboration between IBM and the City University of New York. Though an internship or work experience is only a component of these successful workforce training programs (in contrast to the apprenticeship model, in which all training takes place “on the job”), general education components of the curriculum may also be built around the practical application of skills. For example, one math professor in the Growth Sector network described explicitly tying math curriculum to the engineering skills that students are trying to develop.

Successful workforce training programs take an intensive approach to building students’ math and technical skills. Many successful programs also provide students with academic support beyond that received in the college in general.

Academic barriers may prevent many students from earning STEM-focused vocational credentials from public community colleges. The curriculum of these programs often requires college-level mathematics, but the majority of students who enter public community colleges do not have college-level math skills. One study of students entering community colleges within the Achieving the Dream network found that 59 percent of students were placed in developmental math but only 33 percent of students completed the developmental math sequence (Bailey, Jeong and Cho, 2010). Remedial or developmental courses may not be an efficient or effective way for students to gain the math skills they need (see Long 2014 for a review of research on remedial or developmental education). A common feature of promising STEM-focused workforce development programs is that program leaders have adopted out-of-the-box strategies for bringing students’ math skills up to college level or for getting students through challenging gateway courses.

At Austin Community College one professor adopted a “flipped classroom” for teaching a biology course that serves as a gateway to several health-related credentials. In this model, students view lectures online, on their own schedule, and class time is used for project-based learning in small groups, in which students have the chance to learn from their peers. An important advantage of this course design is that, because the professor walks around the class interacting with the small groups, students may actually get more individual attention than they would if the professor was leading the class in a traditional lecture format. By interacting with small groups of students and observing them problem-solve, the professor is more easily able to identify and correct students’ misunderstandings or gaps in understanding than she would be in a traditional classroom model.

STEM-focused workforce development programs in the Growth Sector network are committed to bringing their students from basic math up through pre-calculus within a single year by teaching math intensively. Students pursing STEM-focused vocational credentials through Growth Sector enroll in three classes a semester at their community college. Two of these class periods are taken up by a math class taught by a single instructor. Though this means that over half of students’ first year coursework is in math, rather than engineering or other content which may fit more with their interests, students placed into remedial or developmental courses at public community colleges are often completely blocked from taking courses beyond the remedial courses.

In addition to taking an intensive approach to teaching math, Growth Sector also has students go through the program in a cohort model, which may benefit students by creating stronger peer networks. One professor described the sense of community that he observed among students experiencing this cohort model. Because of the cohort, students have a ready group of potential resources (each other) when they have questions or problems with academics. Finally, in the Growth Sector model, students also benefit from a tutor who provides support with both academic and life issues. Importantly, this tutor is not someone students have to find and arrange to meet with. The tutor attends classes with the cohort, so students can easily access him or her before or after class. In addition, the tutor provides a bridge between students and the professor. The math professor I interviewed explained that he would be unaware of challenges faced by some students if it weren’t for communication from the tutor. He said this made him better able to help students persist and get through his challenging material.

Successful STEM-focused workforce training programs develop in colleges that have strong leadership and a culture of innovation.

Several college and program leaders described the administrative barriers to developing new workforce training programs at their colleges. At many public community colleges, creating a new credential program requires meeting the requirements of several bureaucratic layers before the program is approved and can be implemented.

Curricular development for new programs can also require cooperation between the academic and vocational sides of a college, which many college representatives that I spoke to brought up as a particular obstacle to creating new programs.

However, successful colleges were able to overcome these bureaucratic hurdles as well as be innovative in the development of the content of their programs because they were in colleges and localities with strong leaders who were interested in innovation.

At one end of the spectrum, P-tech was able to overcome the hurdles involved in the development and implementation of a new education model requiring multiple networks, because they had support from the New York City mayor, as well as Governor Cuomo. This unique situation may have resulted from the clout IBM has as a major employer in New York. However, in other cases, colleges without an influential partner such as IBM were still able to innovate at least in part because they had a leader committed to innovation and state leadership that recognized the benefits of supporting networks between employers and public community colleges to help grow the local economy. For example, at LCC having strong leadership interested in innovation at the college and state levels helped pave the way to the development of their unique mechatronics program and the development of the SMART Center.

Finally, promising workforce training programs often have access to foundation or other outside funding sources.

Declining state appropriations for higher education have left public community colleges with ever-tightening budgets and increasing reliance on tuition dollars as a source of revenue. Given the scarcity of public resources, it is not surprising that a common characteristic of the successful STEM-focused workforce training programs in my sample was that they had access to some source of outside funding for the initial development of their program or to fund the process of making pedagogical or curricular changes to an existing program. Several colleges in the sample benefited from grants from the Achieving the Dream network. Other programs, such as the Growth Sector network rely exclusively on foundation funding for their work. Finally, some colleges benefited from the Department of Education’s Workforce Innovation Fund Grants, which specifically helps promote workforce training programs that graduate workers to fill local labor market needs.

Policy recommendations

In this section I make five policy recommendations to facilitate the development and sustainability of successful STEM-focused workforce training programs. The first three recommendations are aimed at community college leaders and focus on promoting cooperation between the academic and vocational sides of the colleges, developing programs that will have long-term benefits for students, and gathering data. The second two recommendations are intended for state policymakers. I suggest that state policymakers help to facilitate coordination between public community colleges and local industry and that states provide a sustainable funding source so that colleges do not have to rely on foundation or other outside funding sources for the maintenance of successful programs.

Colleges and program leaders should develop workforce training programs, not just with an eye to immediate labor market access, but to students’ long term outcomes. To this end, credentials should be stackable (classes for credentials build cumulatively towards degree requirements) and portable (recognized outside of local labor markets).

Labor markets are not static. Lalonde and Sullivan (2010) describe the issues faced by displaced workers and make a series of proposals that could help these workers adapt to changing labor markets. Even when industries are not specifically shutting down, rapidly changing technologies may force many workers to return to school and upgrade their skills just to keep hold of their current jobs. Ideally for these students, obtaining additional training would not require that they start from square one. A potential downside of certificate programs, which are highly focused on a particular skill set, is that students who earn them may have to retrain every time the local economy changes or they want to advance in their job. If credentials are designed to be stackable then one certificate program builds on another and, ideally, a series of these credentials will add up to an associate degree.

Likewise, Americans are increasingly mobile. On the one hand, when community college credentials are tightly linked to local labor markets, this may increase the immediate benefits of earning such a credential. However, if credentials that are valued in local labor markets are not recognized in other labor markets and across state lines, workers with these credentials may have to retrain if they are forced to leave the local labor market. Thus, ideally, vocational credentials awarded by public community colleges would be portable so that they are recognized by similar industries in other localities. The National Coalition of Certification Centers (NC3) provides one model for assuring that credentials are portable. NC3 develops credentials at the national level before designing and implementing the training programs at local colleges. These credentials are also designed to be stackable.

Though there is a growing push to design short credentials to be stackable, we know very little about whether students choose and are able to take advantage of the stackability of short credentials, though theoretically credentials with these features should benefit students by increasing the likelihood of completing an academic degree by shortening the time and cost to completion. There is also not yet any robust research on whether or how stackability affects labor market returns or other benefits that students receive from earning community college certificates.

College leaders should create incentives for the academic and vocational sides of community colleges to work together during the development of workforce training programs.

Several community college representatives with whom I spoke described a disconnect between the academic and vocational sides of community colleges. One interviewee said that senior leadership doesn’t understand the vocational side of the college and another person with whom I spoke implied that it is difficult to build and innovate within these workforce development programs because of in-fighting between the vocational and academic sides of the college. This has important implications for sustaining enrollment in workforce development programs (because the academic and vocational sides of the college may be competing for enrollment) as well as whether credentials can be made stackable. In order for a stackable credential to benefit students, they have to be able to move between the vocational side of the college, where they earned the initial short certificate, and the academic side, where they would continue a longer associate degree. This in turn would require that the vocational and academic sides of the college agree upon the curriculum of these credentials, so that the academic side will accept credits earned on the vocational side. Community college leaders seeking to facilitate communication and cooperation between the academic and vocational sides of the college should consider making use of a third party mediator in order to overcome barriers to cooperation and communication.

Colleges and program leaders should gather data to track outcomes including persistence; completion; short, medium, and long-term labor market outcomes; and the attainment of further education.

STEM-focused workforce development programs should gather data on student enrollment, persistence, completion and labor market outcomes. It is essential that this data be collected in order to determine whether new programs retain students and improve labor market outcomes for example, by increasing rates of employment and leading students to find jobs that pay higher wages. Moreover, in order for community college leaders, researchers, and other interest groups to determine whether program participation has a positive effect on student outcomes, and to determine which program components are particularly essential to student success, program data needs to be linked to full student records as well as unemployment insurance (UI) data5 and made available to researchers. A program’s success can’t be determined only by descriptive statistics or trend data. Students are recruited and select into these programs and it is not possible to determine from descriptive statistics or trends whether a program is successful because of student characteristics or program characteristics.

If program data is linked to student record data, then, at the very least, researchers analyzing trends in program data can control for student characteristics. In the ideal situation, if program data is linked to detailed student record data as well as UI data, it may be possible to obtain causal estimates of program effects (as opposed to descriptive estimates, as in the case of trend analyses) using quasi-experimental methods. The difficult nature of determining whether it is program characteristics, or student characteristics, that are driving positive trends in student outcomes has important implications for the likelihood that a program will be able to be scaled up successfully or replicated in different contexts or with different groups of students.

Collecting program data and linking it to student record data is also essential for community college and program leaders. First, this data will allow program leaders to analyze who selects into this program. This type of analysis is essential for student recruitment and for understanding how new workforce development programs fit into the larger institution. This data can also be used to make the case for additional funding, to recruit additional partners or to make the case for increasing the scale of the program. Indeed, representatives from Growth Sector describe using program data and trends to convince additional colleges to join their network. Finally, data on student participation, persistence and success should also be used for data-driven decisionmaking about curricular changes or the development of additional programs.

State policymakers should make sure community college leaders and program developers have access to seed money for innovation as well as developing a plan for sustaining funding for programs that prove to be successful.

Several of the promising STEM-focused workforce development programs in my sample were developed with the aid of foundation funding. This makes sense insofar as many of these programs are innovative and additional, outside funding may be necessary in order to give these programs the freedom to innovate in the initial stages of development. However, in order for these programs to be sustainable, the state and institution must plan to invest in those that demonstrate success beyond the initial start-up period. Successful workforce development programs produce human capital and have positive impacts on the local economy; state and local leaders should see the value in making investments that achieve these goals. Ideally, partners from local industries who are benefitting from programs that seek to help fill labor force needs would be also be willing to invest in these programs.

States should help coordinate relations between industry and colleges through some central body such as local chambers of commerce.

Successfully building and maintaining relationships with local industries is a major obstacle for many community colleges interested in developing STEM-focused workforce development programs. Some community college and program leaders who had overcome this obstacle described developing relationships with local industries over long periods of time. Representatives from Patrick Henry Community College, who had highly functioning relationships with local industries emphasized the importance of welcoming the perspectives of local industries, being flexible to accommodate them, and being efficient in interacting with them (i.e. only holding meetings with clear agendas and keeping them short). Colleges that don’t already have these relationships would benefit from a third-party collaborator helping to establish and support networking between local industries and public community colleges. Growth Sector is an example of a model for developing networks between community colleges and local industry in which a third-party, nonprofit organization coordinates and manages the network. However, the third party does not have to be an independent nonprofit. It could be a local entity, such as a chamber of commerce, that has connections with public higher education leaders as well as local employers. The chamber of commerce could be a natural coordinator of these networks because it also has a vested interest in maintaining the health of the local economy and likely already exists in many communities where community colleges are located.

Conclusion

This report described five common characteristics across promising workforce training programs which seem to contribute to their success. However, none of these programs, to my knowledge, has been subject to a rigorous evaluation. In several cases, data is being collected on students in order to keep track of persistence and employment rates of participants. However, because students are recruited into and select into these programs, it is difficult to disentangle program effects from characteristics of the students themselves. In other words, a student who chooses to participate in a workforce development program with an intensive mathematics component such as the programs associated with Growth Sector may be a particularly determined and motivated student to start with. If these students successfully graduate and find gainful employment after completing the program, this may have more to do with the characteristics the students came into the program with, rather than elements of the program itself. More research is essential to determine whether these types of workforce training programs have a positive, causal effect on students’ outcomes.

Also important in considering the future development of these programs is the observation that many of these programs have problems developing and maintaining enrollment. This is interesting and also speaks to the dual mission of the community college—students may be more drawn to the academic side (the more “traditional” college side of the institution), and so the vocational and academic sides are competing for enrollment.

This issue, brought up by many of the college representatives with whom I spoke, may at first seem at odds with overall growing trends in the completion of short, vocational credentials. Yet, the on-the-ground perspective that attracting and maintaining enrollment in new programs is a challenge suggests that there is a great deal of variation in enrollment trends across individual programs, and may be a product of the inherently more dynamic and responsive model workforce development programs operate under. It also suggests that it may take more effort from the community college to educate students about these new programs and persuade them that these career pathways could be beneficial and fit with their interests. One representative from Northern Virginia Community College explained that students are not interested in the jobs these programs are training them to enter; therefore, building student interest around the program content and employment trajectories associated with these credentials is an essential component of program development and has not received commensurate attention.

Dadgar, M., & Trimble, M. J. (2015). Labor market returns to sub-baccalaureate credentials: How much does a community college degree or certificate pay? Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 37(4), 399–418.

Grubb, W. N. (1995). The returns to education and training in the sub-baccalaureate labor market: Evidence from the Survey of Income and Program Participation, 1984–1990 (MDS-765). Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley.

Jenkins, N. M. (2015). Collaborate in the classroom. Compete in the labor market. A case study: National Coalition of Certification Centers. Washington, DC: Skills for America’s Future at the Aspen Institute.

Xu, D., & Trimble, M. J. (2016). What about certificates? Evidence on the labor market returns to nondegree community college awards in two states. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 38(2), 272–292.

Thank you to representatives from the following colleges and organizations who participated in this research:

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Teachers are among our most valuable school resources for improving student learning. They are the adults who interact most with students, and we rely on teachers to deliver curriculum and instruction. The research evidence is clear that teachers have long-term effects on students’ later well-being, including on their academic achievement, how far they go in school, and their wages once working. One large study, for example, found that students assigned to particularly effective teachers in a single year were more likely to attend college (1.25 percent), earned higher salaries ($25,000 in cumulative lifetime income), and were less likely to have children as teenagers (1.25 percent).

THE SITUATION

In order for students to benefit from good teachers, school systems must recruit, prepare, improve, and retain excellent teachers and distribute these excellent teachers equitably across schools and communities. We currently face challenges across these areas. These challenges are exacerbated for teachers of math, science, special education, and English as a second language, and for teachers in high-poverty schools and other schools serving high-needs students. One study, for example, found that schools received more than three times as many applications for elementary school teaching jobs than for secondary school positions, and more than two times as many applications for secondary history teaching jobs as for math, science, or special education jobs. Moreover, a report from the U.S. Department of Education found that teacher turnover rates are much higher in high-poverty schools (22 percent) than low-poverty schools (13 percent).

Over the past 15 years, federal policy has addressed issues of teacher quality through the Highly Qualified Teacher provisions of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and by incentivizing states to develop teacher evaluation systems. The Highly Qualified Teacher Provision of NCLB required states to staff their classrooms with teachers who hold a bachelor’s degree, have full state certification or licensure, and prove that they know each subject they teach in order for the state to receive Title I funds. This provision likely had little effect on existing teachers, though it did create a minimum standard for entering teachers. States determined their own certification requirements, so this standard varied across states.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) eliminated this provision and reduced the incentives for states and districts to develop teacher evaluation systems that could be used to support teacher and program improvement. In contrast to NCLB, ESSA only requires that states report differences in teachers’ professional qualifications between high-poverty and low-poverty schools and the strategies they will use to ensure that low-income and minority students are not more likely to have ineffective, out-of-field, or inexperienced teachers. The elimination of the threat of reduced funding might reduce states’ efforts to recruit teachers in more difficult-to-staff schools.

ESSA also reduced the role of the federal government in maintaining teacher quality by stepping back its focus on building teacher evaluation systems based on student performance and observational measures of teaching. While both Race to the Top and the NCLB waiver process encouraged states to use such evaluation systems—and required states that were granted waivers to use them—ESSA does not include such a requirement. The new law explicitly permits states to use Title II funds to develop and improve such systems, but it does not require them to do so. The Teacher Incentive Fund remains in place (now called the Teacher and School Leader Incentive Fund), providing grants to states to implement evaluation systems and build human capital management systems more generally. However, these are competitive grants (so not as widespread as the main provisions in ESSA) and they focus on performance pay (which has generally not proven effective) instead of evaluation for decisionmaking more broadly.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The federal government can increase the effectiveness of the teacher workforce through efforts to recruit, prepare, improve, retain, and more equally distribute excellent teachers. In keeping with the broader federal role in education, the federal role in teaching policy involves investments in capacity building and knowledge generation. We add to that a special role for the president in elevating the importance of teaching through the bully pulpit provided by the presidency.

Capacity building

The federal government builds capacity in education through direct funding for specific schools or programs, minimum requirements tied to funding, and incentives to develop innovative programs. While the goal of federal policy should be to improve the recruitment, preparation, development, retention, and more equal sorting of teachers, the policy approach does not need to address each of these areas separately. A well-coordinated capacity-building agenda to improve teaching could affect all areas through the improvement of talent management systems.

The Teacher Incentive Fund has provided grants for projects that develop and implement performance-based teacher and principal compensation systems in high-need schools. We recommend a similar approach to support projects that develop talent management systems more broadly. These systems would collect and use consistent and validated measures of educator performance to provide regular feedback to teachers, and make human resource decisions such as whom to hire, whom to promote, how to support, and how to target retention efforts. Federal programs should incentivize district and state reforms that build effective systems that lead to informed human resource decision-making and that provide supports for teacher improvement, including both information and time for development.

Teacher preparation: Districts, and even states, can use talent management systems to assess the qualities of teachers from different teacher preparation pathways. The measures in these systems could contribute to understanding the effectiveness and sustained retention of graduates from various teacher preparation programs, as well as the extent to which each teacher preparation program is providing teachers for difficult-to-staff subject areas and schools. These measures could support state-level accountability system for teacher preparation programs. In particular, the federal government should incentivize the collection and reporting on these measures as part of talent-management systems.

Teacher recruitment: Recruiting people into teaching is likely to be a challenge in the coming years. First, recruiting new teachers is more difficult when the economy is strong. Second, the number of college students applying to teacher preparation programs has decreased rapidly over the past few years, as has the number of college graduates applying to alternative teacher preparation programs such as Teach for America (TFA). Applications to TFA alone have fallen 35 percent in the past three years. Finally, increased retirements have also created a need for additional teachers. However, the supply of new teachers is not uniform across subject areas or for teaching positions in different regions and neighborhoods. Talent management systems can help districts and school leaders to identify and select the most promising candidates. For example, recent research shows that information collected from applicants for teaching positions predicts how effective teachers are when entering the classroom, yet few principals use this type of information when selecting teachers.

Teacher improvement: Public schools employ more than three million teachers, making teaching the largest public occupation in the U.S. With such a massive teacher workforce, policy that focuses solely on new teachers is not an effective approach for improvement; policies also need to focus on improving the abilities of current teachers. Simple silver-bullet solutions, such as performance pay for teachers, have not produced the intended improvements. Large studies in Tennessee and Texas, for example, find no benefit of performance pay systems. Nonetheless, teacher evaluation for the purposes of providing feedback for improvement and improving human capital decisions has proven beneficial. For example, one study of teacher evaluation in Cincinnati, Ohio, found that students assigned to a teacher after she participated in the evaluation system scored about 10 percent of a standard deviation higher in math than similar students taught by the same teacher prior to participation. In another study, in Tennessee, researchers studied a system in which teachers received specific feedback on their teaching and had incentives to improve. They found that less effective teachers who were paired with more effective teachers improved their teaching substantially relative to those without the additional support. These findings suggest that any talent management system should include both well-validated measures of teaching practice for teacher evaluation and support for teacher improvement that includes regular feedback to teachers.

Teacher retention: Although most schools do not have trouble retaining teachers, teacher retention is a significant problem for some schools, particularly those serving high-need populations. Moreover, teacher turnover negatively affects even the teachers who stay, so retaining strong teachers has the double benefit of keeping good teachers and reducing the negative impact on their colleagues (although some turnover can be beneficial, especially if a given teacher is not benefiting a school). High-quality talent management systems would provide information on which schools need help in retaining teachers, and then would identify teachers who are particularly important and target resources toward their retention. For example, a recent paper shows that when principals received information from the district about the effectiveness of their teachers, they were differentially more likely to retain the more effective teachers.

While investment in talent management systems could address each of the mechanisms producing highly effective teachers, investments by the federal government specifically in recruitment and retention would benefit the teacher workforce.

Create and sustain financial incentives for entering teaching in high-need subjects and schools.

The supply of teachers depends in part on the affordability and attractiveness of a teaching career. While teaching may have substantial non-monetary rewards, teachers (like most adults) respond to financial incentives. For example, interest in teaching increases when salaries are higher. The federal government has a role to play in making teaching more affordable by reducing the financial hurdles to teaching.

The federal government can support teachers by reducing the costs of entering the field, such as by providing forgivable loans for students who want to become teachers. Currently, the federal government provides both Teacher Education Assistance for College and Higher Education (TEACH) grants and forgivable loans for prospective teachers who commit to teaching in Title I or other high-needs schools. The federal government should continue to support such programs. This funding will best address today’s needs if it is targeted to subject areas and schools that are difficult to staff. Policymakers could also use these types of investments to better align the background characteristics of teachers and students (e.g., with respect to race and ethnicity). Currently, black and Hispanic adults, in particular, are underrepresented in the teacher workforce relative to the student population. We recommend continuing the current policies of federal government support for efforts to diversify the teaching force, especially with forgivable loan programs and particularly for recruiting black and Latino males into teaching.

Support retention bonuses or salary increases for highly effective teachers in high-needs schools.

To further support high-quality talent management, we recommend targeting retention bonuses or salary increases for highly effective teachers who remain in high-needs schools. One approach we recommend is to incentivize states to include such bonuses in their talent management systems. The measures of highly effective and high needs would need to be clearly defined in order to assure that the bonuses are maximizing benefits. The Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) provides an example of such a differentiated pay structure. In the case of TAP, differentiated pay is tied to differentiated roles and selection into the roles is tied to demonstration of effectiveness.

This focus on retaining teachers within high-needs school is important for a number of reasons. First, it has proven difficult to move highly effective teachers in easier-to-staff schools to difficult-to-staff schools. For example, the Talent Transfer Initiative offered $20,000 over two years for highly effective teachers to move, and only 22 percent of eligible teachers applied. Moreover, teachers who are effective in one type of school are not necessarily effective in another type of school. A study of the Talent Transfer Initiative found that transfers increased student performance in elementary schools but not in middle schools. Second, the few studies of retention incentives have found positive effects. For example, a recent study in Florida found that a $1,200 one-time retention bonus offered to high school teachers in targeted subject areas decreased teacher attrition by as much as 25 percent and one in North Carolina with an $1,800 bonus reduced attrition by 18 percent. We recommend letting Title I dollars be used for salaries as well as including retention bonus as a part of talent management systems incentivized by federal dollars.

Knowledge generation

The federal government also plays, and should continue to play, a critically important role in investing in the generation of new knowledge to improve educational quality through strategic investments in research.

Invest in the development of new measures of talent and new knowledge about their effective use in talent management systems.

Educational quality is largely a function of the quality of human resources within schools and districts. Doing a better job of identifying talented teachers, administrators, and other professionals will be critical to creating robust talent management systems. The last ten years have brought many advances in the measurement of teaching effectiveness, but the development of valid and reliable measures and how best to use them are still in their early stages. Further investment by the federal government in the development of measures—and in improving knowledge of how to use them effectively—could benefit schools across the country.

Invest in research that provides new evidence on excellent preparation for teaching

Although we have some evidence on how to recruit, support, and retain teachers, our evidence on how to prepare teachers before they enter the classroom is far weaker. Research has shown that teachers obtaining certification through only an online exam (American Board for the Certification of Teacher Excellence) are, on average, not as effective as teachers with more intensive preparation. However, we have little information on the best practices for pre-service training, aside from some evidence that high-quality field experiences, such as those in highly effective schools and including regular supervision and feedback, can make a difference.

The federal government is in the best position to improve this knowledge base by investing in systematic research in this area. Teacher education programs provide a lot of data on their programs through Title II, but these data are not useful for answering questions about what models of teacher preparation are best. Under ESSA, Title II will continue to provide funding to states and local districts to support teacher preparation. However, the new federal regulations provide greater latitude to develop innovative programs to prepare teachers, including residency programs, alternative routes, and free-standing “teacher academies.” The intent of the legislation is to provide more innovation in teacher preparation. However, this innovation should be accompanied by investments in research that generate knowledge from such experimentation and inform efforts to improve teacher preparation more broadly.

The federal government could invest in programs of research that produce high-quality evidence of how best to prepare teachers. This research would need to include experimental evidence on the relative benefits of different types of training—such as student teaching with feedback, classes on subject-specific pedagogy, classes on classroom management, and classes on learning and learning differences. It would also benefit from more useful data collection that includes information on the backgrounds and experiences of teacher candidates as well as their career paths as teachers, enabling studies of the interactions between teacher characteristics, preparation experiences, and school contexts.

Such a research program could then inform accreditation and accountability efforts in teacher education. Current efforts to improve teacher preparation have also stressed accountability principles that require programs to be evaluated on the effectiveness of their graduates. Understanding how to link various indicators of educator effectiveness (including teacher knowledge, classroom practice, and student achievement) back to their preparation programs will require more sophisticated research that could build on the research base from teacher evaluation. Because teachers work in wildly different contexts, such efforts to tie teacher performance to their preparation will need to take into consideration the schools in which teachers from different preparation programs work.

The bully pulpit

Finally, the presidential office provides an opportunity to influence decision-making separate from direct investments or investments in knowledge generation. We urge the new president to use this opportunity to support the teaching profession.

Directly promote teaching careers.

Direct recruitment of teachers on college campuses, and in advertisements on public transportation and on the radio have proven effective for alternative certification programs such as Teach for America and the New York City Teaching Fellows. These approaches emphasize the importance and satisfaction of teacher careers. The president is in a unique position to raise the appeal of teaching simply through promotion. Teachers have received blame in recent years for low student performance, and this blame can discourage strong candidates from entry. The president can highlight the importance of teaching and contributions of teachers, as well the joys of teaching and helping students.

The federal government can also make teaching more appealing by making it easy for college students and graduates to learn about teaching and to pursue a teaching career. Lack of information can create unnecessarily strong barriers to entry. Going beyond the bully pulpit, we recommend federal investment in programs that provide early experiences in teaching that encourage people to think of teaching as a career. Examples of such programs include UTeach (aimed at STEM teachers), City Year, and Breakthrough Collaborative.

CONCLUSION

Teachers are the most important school resource for improving educational opportunities for students. We recommend six steps for the federal government to improve the teacher workforce, particularly in the most difficult-to-staff schools:

Use a competitive funding program to incentivize effective talent management systems that use well-validated measures of educator effectiveness.

Create and sustain financial incentives for entering teaching in high-need subjects and schools.

Support retention bonuses or salary increases for highly effective teachers in high-needs schools by allowing the use of Title I dollars for salaries and by prioritizing the inclusion of retention bonuses in talent management systems incentivized by federal dollars.

Invest in the development of new measures of talent and in new knowledge about their effective use in talent management systems.

Invest in research that provides new evidence on excellent preparation for teaching.

Use the presidential platform to directly promote teaching careers.

Taking these steps would substantially improve the teacher workforce by addressing teacher recruitment, preparation, development, and retention, particularly in the schools that would benefit the most from these improvements.

Support for this project was generously provided by the Spencer Foundation. Brookings recognizes that the value it provides is in its absolute commitment to quality, independence, and impact. Activities supported by its donors and by outside contributors reflect this commitment. The authors did not report receipt of financial support from any firm or person for this memorandum or from any firm or person with a financial or political interest in this article that creates a conflict of interest.